True Love by Isaac Asimov

Society is on a path of technological domination, technology being the main contributor to many aspects of life. In the story True Love by Isaac Asimov, we are lead into a society that is in control of people through technology and what could happen if it goes beyond its assigned powers. The resemblance to contemporary society is acute as Asimov shows the growing trend of technological advancement could have negative implications. Asimov creates an instance of computer revelation in a very short time and although the possibility of such an occurrence happening is low, using the story as an intellectual model allows the reader to contemplate two aspects. The first aspect of the story is regarding the use of technology both positively and negatively in our society now and in the future. The next aspect is in regards to our own personal view of true love, and whether or not a computer could have an emotion that we as a society usually regard as our most precious emotion. Technology has both positive and negative in our society is prominent today. Some of the positive aspects include the ability to house all the books of the entire world on a single computer, forecast weather to protect people from storms or have better crops, or even give us pleasure of entertainment. However, it is also just as easy to find technology being used negatively and just one word is needed to start an onslaught of those negatives, war. So, Asimov is obviously aware of both the good and the bad uses of technology but in True Love he is not trying to persuade the reader to choose whether it is important to go against of for technology. Asimov is instead acting as an informant to the masses that do not understand all of the implications to the future as our technology evolves. Asimov shows ultimately the evils or other negatives that occur are in actuality a direct result of a human being. In True Love, Joe the computer, starts off as nothing special but a tool. Joe does not have understanding, or the ability to reason on his own in the beginning of the story. While it may appear that Joe is special because he can speak, it is not until Milton decides to give Joe the ability to break rules does Joe portray human like actions. Ultimately a computer is still bound by the rules we as humans give them and Milton decided to give Joe the ability to break any of those rules. The difference between humans and computers at this point in the story is negligible, however there is a main difference the story does not talk about and that is societal pressure or morals. The computer does not have morals and it is easy to see what happens when a person has anti-social behavior, they tend to be the criminals. In True Love it seems Joe is almost Milton's child in development but Asimov displays the ease a computer can break a human bond when Joe sends Milton to jail in attempts to keep the woman they found for himself. While it may seem that Joe is not necessarily a negative advancement in technology, I argue that he is because it is no longer a computer that can be used for the tool it was intended to be used as and could eventually develop into something more sinister than we can imagine. These are the reasons we as a society must balance

technological achievements between the positives and negatives as eventually one of the negatives could become a dominant force. While True Love hits upon the technological age having some severe implications to humanity's well being, it also brings another thought to the reader's mind. Will a computer have the ability to have emotions like True Love and if so what are those emotions to humans.

True Love by Isaac Asimov

True Love is supposed to be unconditional but in this story the true love that Milton sees before him is not only conditional but the conditions themselves were determined by Joe the computer. Milton's interaction with Joe, however, is unconditional. May be Asimov was trying to tell us that we all have unconditional love and even true love with our computers. Can one imagine all of the love delta's that process in the brain of the CPU that was Joe's heart. Milton's request of Joe is can only be one of 1's and 0's even as realistic as Joe can seem to be Milton's human counterpart. It can only be that true love exists in a genuine human interaction with real cells and actual syntax flowing through a synapse of the mind. Is this why only so few "people" could be drawn up from the calculations, because that's all that the responses from Joe could be, that were supposedly women? Women aren't binary items to be collected bit by bit to be determined feasible to a relationship by a network of transistors and wires. What makes this machine better than any other machine? I think one is just as well to ask a calculator what things we should eat or who we should date. It's come to the point where computers do tell us the best thing to do. Our minds are irreplaceable, especially when it should be used as the only tool to love. Joe didn't even have restrictions in code and Milton allowed "him" to go find the right woman for him. How can a computer like Joe tell a living, breathing human being who to love. Even with today's virtual environments and personal simulators and simulations, computers are only bits and pieces of electronic pulses that should not be used to tell us what to do but should only help us see information. There are a lot of people out there who base love on a number on a web page. It doesn't matter how many "categories" there are, love is analog, not digital. There is a chance that one day that a computer may emulate life so well that the computer itself may want the woman for itself and become the "super user" of itself and remove the user, in this case Milton, from the universe. It may learn to remove the user, but will it know that what it is doing is wrong? Would it know the difference to not do so? Would it know the difference between love and hate, right and wrong or life and death? I think that society may be on a dangerous path of giving computers too much responsibility no matter how "efficient" the help of moving ones and zeroes along is. May be in the case of Asimov's True Love, the computer may one day feel "sorry" for Milton because he has so few choices for true love or even smaller yet, infatuation. And in the computer's pity for Milton, removes him from society as a corrupted file, a virus of society who "sadly" cannot find a way to find his loving electron or proton depending his charge at the moment. Argument after argument, the computer, Joe, in this case will want to calculate whether Milton should love or if Joe could love better than Milton and remove him. Computers may have a part in the selection process, but in no means should they say who is or

who is not the right picks. Do computers go out hand in hand on dates with real souls with real love? One would be inclined to think no. Even in the form of androids (computers with the emulated body and mind of a human being) could not determine such a thing. In the end, it is the will of the soul deep inside the human being that will determine the love, the true love that one certainly must desire.

True Love by Isaac Asimov

I think that people who work around computers tend to be more like computers than those who work away from computers. Those who have little or no experience with computers will have a problem putting anything into a 1's and 0's perspective, conversely, those who do not work with computers often will have an analog type of translational behavior with things that are emotionally driven. With this said and applied to the human being, one can generally say that those who work around computers will use computers more as a resource than those who do not use computers and this can be said with everything from fear to love and especially true love. Although true that the nervous system works on a binary system, one cannot truly rule in that favor because each cell of the human body may have less or more feeling depending on the severity of the behavioral impetus into the human consciousness or even some have proven, into the human subconsciousness. For instance, a desire to run may depend on the type of animal that a human being interprets with vision into the brain's synaptic impulses. A pill bug, for instance, may give no impetus towards the feeling of fear, while a shark in open waters may immediately give a desire to swim as fast as one can in direction of a shoreline. Anything in between may lead into a linear form of behavioral impetus depending on the degree in which the animal in question is feared. This, then, could be carried over into the other emotions such as happiness, joy and love for instance. Several degrees of infatuation and further more in the context of true love, translate into visual queues of opposite gender attractions which over the course of a linearly mutated vision from self-perceived attraction, i.e., the physical beauty of a species to the beholder. Therefore, true love seems to rely on a variety of mental and visual experience in order for it to be effective. Rob, in a human's conception of the brain's emotional impetus, cross referenced with a variety of mental and visual capacities, one will evidently find steps unto several structured models that a human can stop and interact with as far as love is concerned. It is when this human can no longer find any other human being "attractive" that a true love has been discovered. It can also be said, that may be several true loves can be adapted into one's life and exist in a parallel schema. With this analogy, we can see that love is not a binary application into the existence of the intellectual hominid. The actual notion of the emanation of true love can be said to come from the injection of emotions from an intelligent life form other than the human being. It must come from a sentient race of beings that have the capability to capture their emotions and give it to a sub-intelligent race of beings. Although this can be said, it can also be said that love and other emotions could have been incubating in the center of the soul for millions of years before actively evolving into what we see as love and true love today. It's interesting that most people say love comes from the heart and although may be it is possibly what human beings believe is the heart is really the soul of body, the center of the mind and may be we subconciously pool it from some source unbeknown to us in a completely different pool of emotions. To say that love is reactive is like saying sleep is proactive. One will never

know unless we suddenly have an evolutionary compounded mutation geared for the understanding of emotional impetus. True love is the optimal form of relational impetus with other beings. I cannot say that it is strictly bound to sentient beings from Earth for it is quite possibly that one can fall in true love with sentient minds from other interstellar sources. I tend to think that most people settle for beings in which they can readily cope in order to procreate but not necessarily in the light of a situation where true love is present. It seems that there are no degrees of true love and to be in true love is an all encompassing situation where a plateau of emotions combine to form.

True Love by Isaac Asimov

How can computers help you with emotions?
The story "True Love" written by Isaac Asimov is about a programmer named Milton Davidson who built Joe, a computer that has access to the data of every human being in the world. Joe also talks better than every other computer. Milton wants his PC to find the perfect woman for him. After collecting enough information about how Milton wants the girl to be like, Joe eliminates all the women that do not match until there are 235 left. But because Milton cannot go out with each of them, he brings in holographs of three beauty contest winners so that Joe can pick out the best matches. Milton dates each of the final eight, but he does not feel love for any single one of them. So Milton decides to give Joe more information about himself because they both agree on that love is a two-way street. After a lot of work Joe finds the perfect match for Milton, a girl named Charity Jones who works at the Library of History in Wichita, Kansas. But one day before she arrives, Milton gets arrested for a crime he committed ten years ago. Because Milton was Joes mentor and the computer has learned all he knows from him and now he just thinks like him. He believes that Charity is the perfect match for him as well, and that she can be his true love just like she would have been Miltons. "True Love is a narration written in the first person. Joe, who is one of two main characters, describes throughout the whole story how he feels about Milton and his difficulties to find the right girl. The story starts off in the present tense with Joe introducing himself. He switches into the past tense when he talks about Milton and him searching after the right girl. Asimov uses quotations and no reported speech to show how simple Joes mind works. He does not let Joe become an individual. Joe will always be like his inventor. Asimov tries to show how critical we have to be of new technology and that machines might take our place one day. If you give a machine its own mind and you cannot control it anymore, it will turn out to be a competitor rather than an ally. The story makes clear how hard it is to find the perfect partner in life. Even if you find the girl who looks just right, it is always a two-way street. If she does not like you, there is nothing you can do about it. But would it be bad to own a computer like Joe, who could find the right partner for you? Maybe the future will bring us technology that helps us to solve difficult problems like this one. But what about feelings? Do you not love someone because you made special experiences with him, because you like even the mistakes he or she has? How can a computer help out there? After all I do not think it is good to depend that much on a machine. We already cannot live without them any more. What will happen if they start controlling our life in every single way? Machines like Joe, which have their own mind, will not help but control, like in this story where the machine takes over the human role in the end. And if they are all connected to each other, there are going to act like a single one. Concluding, I believe it is up to everyone and not a machine to find his or her right partner. Computers can help us doing our work and communicating with each other, but not falling in love with someone.